Dab Kinzer eBook

“Could she have thought me ill-bred or impertinent?”
he muttered to himself.

Thought? About him?

Poor Dab Kinzer! Annie Foster had so much else
to think of just then; for she was compelled to go
over, for Ford’s benefit, the whole story of
her tribulations at her uncle’s, and the many
rudenesses of Joe Hart and his brother Fuz.

CHAPTER X

A CRUISE IN “THE SWALLOW.”

“Look at Dabney Kinzer,” said Jenny Walters
to her mother, in church, the next morning. “Did
you ever see anybody’s hair as smooth as that?”

Smooth it was, certainly; and he looked, all over,
as if he had given all the care in the world to his
personal appearance. How was Annie Foster to
guess that he had gotten himself up so unusually on
her account? She did not guess it; but when she
met him at the church-door, after service, she was
careful to address him as “Mr. Kinzer,”
and that made poor Dabney blush to his very eyes.

“There!” he exclaimed: “I know
it.”

“Know what?” asked Annie.

“Know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you, indeed?”

“Yes: you think I’m like the crabs.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think I was green enough till you spoke
to me, and now I’m boiled red in the face.”

Annie could not help laughing,—­a little,
quiet, Sunday-morning sort of a laugh; but she was
beginning to think her brother’s friend was not
a bad specimen of a Long Island “country boy.”

She briskly turned away the small remains of that
conversation from crabs and their color; but she told
her mother, on their way home, she was sure Dabney
would be a capital associate for Ford.

That young gentleman was tremendously of the same
opinion. He had come home, the previous evening,
from a long conference with Dab, brimful of the proposed
yachting cruise; and his father had freely given his
consent, much against the inclinations of Mrs. Foster.

“My dear,” said the lawyer, “I feel
sure a woman of Mrs. Kinzer’s unusual good sense
would not permit her son to go out in that way if she
did not feel safe about him. He has been brought
up to it, you know; and so has the colored boy who
is to go with them.”

“Yes, mother,” argued Ford: “there
isn’t half the danger there is in driving around
New York in a carriage.”

“There might be a storm,” she timidly
suggested.

“The horses might run away.”

“Or you might get upset.”

“So might a carriage.”

The end of it all was, however, that Ford was to go,
and Annie was more than half sorry she could not go
with them. In fact, she said so to Dabney himself,
as soon as her little laugh was ended, that Sunday
morning.